Thursday, July 10, 2008

the human limit/l’expérience-limite

Before I had ever read the phrase “l’expérience-limite”, I had felt it. In the rather peculiar way one gropes around a hole in the dark, gaining a hand understanding which is, of course, difficult to put into words that belong to the world of light. The feeling, which was especially strong in me in the eighties, was that the norms of success, success as I had imbibed it in the burbs where I grew up, encoded, at a deep level, a ghastly defeat. The term of success were simply the terms of a dishonorable surrender, a betrayal of the forces one’s ego could muster, just so as to retire to a lifetime of being able to purchase enough stupifiants to help one forget the treason, that failed slave revolt. This is, of course, a child’s view of that artificial paradise, our life now. On the other hand, our criteria are determined by our situation – I have no overall vision of this time in which to judge it absolutely.

So, when I encountered the phrase in Blanchot, who I read after reading Bataille (and Bataille has always been closer to my heart) – I was magically caught up in it. In fact, in the early nineties, under the banner of l’expérience-limite, I fucked up in a number of ways that I’m not going to go into – some of them I am still paying for.

Since, at the moment, I am using the “human limit” to help me define that way of being in the world which was eclipsed by the happiness culture, I thought I’d go back and see what Foucault said about l’expérience-limite – he whose life was, according to his biographer, James Miller, so enthralled by that notion. Actually, Foucault doesn’t say much about it directly. But he does make one of his flashing, gnostic remarks in an interview with Duccio Trombadori in 1978:

“ The phenomenologist's experience is basically a way of organizing the conscious perception (_regard reflexif_) of any aspect of daily, lived experience in its transitory form, in order to grasp its meaning. Nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot, on the contrary, try through experience to reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or extreme. They attempt to gather the maximum amount of intensity and impossibility at the same time. The work of the phenomenologist, however, essentially consists of unfolding the entire field of possibilities connected to daily experience.

Moreover, phenomenology tries to grasp the significance of daily experience in order to reaffirm the fundamental chracter of the subject, of the self, of its transcendental functions. On the contrary, experience according to Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille has rather the task of "tearing" the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely "other" than itself so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation.

It is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a "limit-experience" that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson that I've learned from these authors. And no matter how boring and erudite my resulting books have been, this lesson has always allowed me to conceive them as direct experiences to "tear" me from myself, to prevent me from always being the same."

This way of looking at the experience limit has, unfortunately, only been applied to Foucault’s own biography. I think, however, it contains the seed of an experience of reading and writing, of the third life, which brings together the adventurer and the book. The book, the use of which becomes the sign that separates the savage from the civilized, would, it seems, not have a savage use – useless to the savage who can’t read it, and transforming the savage who does read it – into the civilized. Perhaps, however, there is a savage literacy, a way of taking the book too seriously, of being driven mad by it, or of going through it – writing it and reading it – as an experience of de-subjectification.

AO 230 = THE MOST RADICAL LESSON THAT ABORIGINALITY HAS IN STORE FOR MODERNITY (AO-47 WE ARE NOT YOU) = 12 / (1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/5 + 1/7 + 1/10 + 1/14 + 1/20 + 1/28 + 1/35 + 1/70 + 1/140 = 5 (AO-22 140, AO-85 HARMONIC DIVISOR NUMBER) = APPROACHING THE KABBALAH OF MAAT: ALTERED TREES AND THE PROCESSION OF THE ÆONS = ENABLING THE CONSTRUCTION OF TEXT USER INTERFACE (TUI) APPLICATIONS = HIGH THERE, HOW HE RUNG UPON THE REIN OF A WIMPLING WING ({4}; AO-59 THE WINDHOVER) = IF WOMEN ARE THE GIFTS, THEN IT IS MEN WHO ARE THE EXCHANGE PARTNERS (If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it. The exchange of women does not necessarily imply that women are objectified, in the modern sense, since objects in the primitive world are imbued with highly personal qualities. But it does imply a distinction between gift and giver. If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage. The relations of such a system are such that women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation. As long as the relations specify that men exchange women, it is men who are the beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges—social organization. -p92 {Gayle Rubin}; AO-228 THE DELIRIUM OF PRAISE: BATAILLE, BLANCHOT, DELEUZE, FOUCAULT, KLOSSOWSKI; AO-75 L'EXPÉRIENCE-LIMITE) = I'VE BEEN FORTY YEARS DISCOVERING THAT THE QUEEN OF ALL COLOURS IS BLACK! (AO-73 PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR) = OBTAINED THROUGH INVESTIGATIONS INTO GROUP PSYCHOLOGY (AO-44 THE REAL ELITE) = PRODUCED VIA COLLISIONS OF CALIFORNIUM-249 ATOMS AND CALCIUM-48 IONS (AO-17 118, AO-45 UNUNOCTIUM) = RIPS AND CUTS SIGNAL HOLES TO MOVE THROUGH, NEW TERRITORIES TO TRAVERSE (AO-111 ERRATIC FLUCTUATIONS OF POTENTIA) = SHIFT OF PERCEPTION RESULTS IN A MOVEMENT OF THE ASSEMBLAGE POINT (AO-68 NAGUALISM AND ALCHEMY) = THE ESSENCE OF THE ARI'S MEDITATITVE SYSTEM CONSISTS OF YICHIDIM = WITHOUT MONEY, WITHOUT INCOME, THERE IS NO SOCIAL EXISTENCE (AO-88 THE ENIGMA OF THE GIFT).

AO 240 = 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974 = 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 58209749 = AT STAKE IS A DIZZYING LIMIT-EXPERIENCE THAT DEFIES DESCRIPTION (AO-75 L'EXPÉRIENCE-LIMITE) = BE MY WITNESS O ALLAH, THAT I HAVE CONVEYED YOUR MESSAGE TO YOUR PEOPLE (AO-62 THE FAREWELL SERMON) = BLIND AND BARREN CROSS OF EQUAL ARMS, TETRAGRAMMATON IN HIS FATAL ASPECT OF FINALITY (AO-34 ACE OF DISKS) = MODERNITY HAS BANNED LIMIT-EXPERIENCE AS A TRANSGRESSIVE FORM OF PRACTICE (AO-47 WE ARE NOT YOU) = SPELLS WHICH SHOULD BE DESCRIBED NEGATIVELY RATHER THAN POSITIVELY (AO-111 ERRATIC FLUCTUATIONS OF POTENTIA) = THE APPARENT POSITION OF THE SUN OSCILLATES BETWEEN THE TWO TROPICS (AO-29 TROPICS; AQ-30 TROPICAL) = WE HAVE TO BE PRODUCED AS LIVING SUBSTANTIAL BEINGS BEFORE WE CAN BEGIN TO ACT (AO-78 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, AO-120 MAN PRODUCES HIMSELF THROUGH LABOUR).

AO 323 = A SATYROS SAW THE BOY, AND ENCHANTED WITH HIS DIVINE BEAUTY HE WHISPERED, CONCEALING HIS WORDS = ALLFRIENDLY PEITHO, MANAGER OF THE HUMAN HEART! GRANT ONLY THAT THIS LOVELY BOY BE GRACIOUS TO ME! = LAMBDA CONTROLS THE SHAPE OF THE PROFILE WHILE EPSILON DETERMINES THE DEGREE OF SPIRALLING = THE NAVAJO BELIEF THAT REALITY IS WHAT WE MAKE IT THROUGH THE SYMBIOSIS OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH = THEREFORE, SET THY FACE TOWARDS THE ULTIMATE GOAL AND STRIVE EVER ONWARD TO THE FURTHEST REACHES OF THE STARS = YOUNG HEGELIANS: THE EXISTING STATE IS NOT YET IN ACCORDANCE WITH ITS "IDEA". IT MUST BE REFORMED.

AO 403 = BECOMES THE CATALYST BY WHICH THE CLANDESTINE BONDS, CONFLICTS AND CONJUNCTIONS INHERENT TO EACH CHADOR BEGIN TO LOOM OUT (AO-111 ERRATIC FLUCTUATIONS OF POTENTIA) = HE(HEBREW) IS THE EMPEROR, AND THE TZADDI THE EMPRESS, OR HIGH PRIESTESS, VIDE SECRET ATTRIBUTIONS INDICATED IN LIBER CCXX (AO-62 III. THE EMPRESS).

AO 475 = 1 CHRONICLES 7:16 AND MAACHAH THE WIFE OF MACHIR BARE A SON, AND SHE CALLED HIS NAME AO-25 PERESH; AND THE NAME OF HIS BROTHER WAS SHERESH; AND HIS SONS WERE ULAM AND RAKEM = HEAR, O ISRAEL: THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD: AND THOU SHALT LOVE THE LORD THY GOD WITH ALL THINE HEART, AND WITH ALL THY SOUL, AND WITH ALL THY MIGHT (475 is a 49-gonal number, member of the AO-74 MIAN-CHOWLA SEQUENCE; AO-13 554, AZ-554) = THE ESSENCE OF THE ARI'S MEDITATITVE SYSTEM CONSISTS OF YICHIDIM (UNIFICATIONS), WHERE ONE MANIPULATES THE LETTERS OF VARIOUS NAMES OF GOD = UNITY UTTERMOST SHOWED! I ADORE THE MIGHT OF THY BREATH, SUPREME AND TERRIBLE GOD, WHO MAKEST THE GODS AND DEATH TO TREMBLE BEFORE THEE: -I, I ADORE THEE!

Can you connect Pabilsang with the cow with the crumpled horn,That tossed the dog,That worried the cat,That killed the rat,That ate the maltThat lay in the house that Jack builtwhich, if Ruskin is right, lies in Knossos, Daedelus' mansion?

Of course, they straightened out the labyrinth and made it a circle at Daytona. If the race was properly conducted, it would never end. Although such is my femme fatale besotted heart that the only race I've ever been interested in was that between Atalanta and Hippomenes.Obviously, this is what happened to Atalanta next. In space!

Roger, the end-thought of this post reminds me of Deleuze and Guatarri's concept, in a Thousand Plateaus, of the book not as an arboreal structure but as a line of flight escaping segmentation, or the book as a rhizome that escapes codification and significance. They conceive of reading not as an interior experience but a radically de-subjectifying, nomadic attack on self-identify and meaning.

Might there be a possible similarity between the line of flight that seeks to escape molar identities and what you have written about as the adventurer's escape from the positional economy? And of course this decoding and recoding of flows is radicalized, yet conserved, most fully in capitalism itself.

I don't get the sense though that D and G have any use for the notion of happiness which seems to be a bourgeois concept: that of the self-contained, self-assured subject able to subsist contentedly in its own satisfaction. No, rather, one thinks of the insurance bureaucrat Kafka who writes about horses, steppes, jackals and arabs at three o'clock in the morning...Well not sure where I'm going with any of this, which is perhaps the point.

AO 251 = AVARICE, AMBITION, HOLLOW RELIANCE ON OUTWARD WORKS, AND AFFECTION OF PIETY (AO-41 PHARISAIOS) = ABSTRACTION IS MADE FROM A FACT; THEN IT IS DECLARED THAT THE FACT IS BASED ON THE ABSTRACTION (AO-78 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY) = AN EAGLE AND A LARGE WHITE DOVE ARE REVEALED CONSTANTLY CHANGING INTO EACH OTHER (AO-23 LIBRA 26°) = AND THEN WE HAVE AN X RAY OF THE FORCES ENGAGED AND WHAT THEY SHOULD BE DOING (AO-62 THE FORCES ENGAGED) = F(N)= \BEGIN{CASES} 0 & \MBOX{IF } N = 0; \\ 1 & \MBOX{IF } N = 1; \\ F(N-1)+F(N-2) & \MBOX{IF } N > 1. \\ \END{CASES} (AO-56 FIBONACCI NUMBER) = HUMANITY PUSH FORWARD IN FRANTIC EFFORT TO CROSS THE BLACK CHASM OF KNOWLEDGE (AO-20 LIBRA 29°) = SECRET CODES, WHICH NOWADAYS OFTEN HINGE ON PROPERTIES OF LARGE PRIMES (AO-14 265, AO-76 TALES OF A NEGLECTED NUMBER) = TROPIC OF CAPRICORN IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE AT 23°26' (23.4°) S LATITUDE.

AO 205 = THE "DISENCHANTING" NATURE OF ETHNOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION (p43, I cannot be certain that my own account will entirely avoid this pitfall. I have tried to describe syewen as little as possible, and when I have done so it is with the specific intent of challenging derogatory whitestream notions of aboriginal cultures. ~ p133, ...i did not want to describe syewen in any more detail than was necessary, because many members of First Nations are not only reluctant to discuss such spiritual practices, but are very unhappy with descriptions of their cultures by outsiders who, it seems, generally misunderstand what they are seeing and what they are told; AO-168 WE ARE NOT YOU: FIRST NATIONS AND CANADIAN MODERNITY) = AS OBJECTIVE SPIRITS HAVING FOR PEOPLE THE CHARACTER OF OBJECTS = BINOCULAR ACUITY IS SUFFICIENT TO GUIDE STRAIGHT-LINE ATTACK = ENTERED THE DELICATE BED OF PEITHO WHO BRINGS MARRIAGE TO PASS = HE' FINAL, THE DAUGHTER, IS SET UPON THE THRONE OF THE MOTHER = INTO A LETTER IS POURED VITAL AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION = MADE AND ACTIVATED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LOGIC OF PERFORATION = MOVING THE ASSEMBLAGE POINT BY THE OPERATION OF INTENT = MULTIPLYING THE NTH PRONIC NUMBER BY THE NTH ODD NUMBER = SCHADENFREUDE: LIVE BLOGGING THE RULES COMMITTEE MEETING = THE TERRORIST MYSTIQUE AND THE HERO LEGEND HAVE THE SAME ROOT = THE VISION OF THE INTERPLAY AND IDENTITY OF EARTH AND AIR = TRUTH IS FORCED TO FLY LIKE A SCARED WHITE DOE IN THE WOODLANDS = WIDELY, DEEPLY, FREE-RANGING, VISUALIZATION, I UNDERSTAND.

AO 239 = A BATTLE AGAINST THE BEWITCHMENT OF OUR INTELLIGENCE BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE (And Wittgenstein defined philosophy as "a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" (1968: § 109). Coming after Wittgenstein, poststructuralist theory also distrusts language. This is one reason why language/discourse is made its chief object of interest: language does not transparently express ultimate reality, and we are fools to think it does. But AO-114 LANGUAGE PRODUCES ITS OWN REALITY, which structures the social world: social reality is, in other words, essentially discursive. This theoretical agenda is indeed at work in Drucilla Cornell's reformulation of deconstruction as "the philosophy of the limit," stemming from that perspective's work of exposing "AO-228 THE QUASI-TRANSCENDENTAL CONDITIONS THAT ESTABLISH ANY SYSTEM… AS A SYSTEM"; this results, in Jacques Derrida's work, in "continually point[ing] to the failure of idealism to capture the real" (Cornell, 1992: I). Hence the insistent association of Derrida's work with the tradition of negative theology which, "as practised by an Eckhart or a John of the Cross, is a prohibition against *any* thematizing of divine presence, any ultimate return to an analogy of being between God and the subject" (Rowan Williams, 1992: 72). —pp24-25, AO-168 WE ARE NOT YOU: FIRST NATIONS AND CANADIAN MODERNITY) = BITOM, GREAT SPIRIT OF FIRE WHO RULES THE ENTIRE ELEMENTAL TABLET OF FIRE = BYCAUSE SHE IS THE BED OF A HARLOT, AND THE DWELLING PLACE OF HIM THAT IS FALN = MODULATIONS OF THE CATEGORIES APPERTAINING TO BOURGEOIS SOCIETY = SINCE WITH GAS I.E. PROPANE, YOU HAVE THE PROBLEM OF OXYGEN SOLVED = THE PRESENCE OR ABSENCE OF OXYGEN IN THE GAS (AERATION OF THE TORCH TIP) = WORKERS… CONTINUALLY REPRODUCE THE CONDITIONS OF THEIR SUBSERVIENCE.

AO 218 = EXARP, GREAT SPIRIT OF AIR WHO RULES THE ENTIRE ELEMENTAL TABLET OF AIR = 6,000 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL AND MUCH HIGHER ABOVE ALL HUMAN THINGS = COOKING WITH GREASE: STIRRING THE POTS IN AMERICAN POLITICS = DAGON HAD FALLEN ON HIS FACE TO THE GROUND BEFORE THE ARK OF YAHWEH = IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING ~ THE RETURN OF THE FIRE WITCH = LET KNOWLEDGE GROW FROM MORE TO MORE; AND SO BE HUMAN LIFE ENRICHED (AO-92 CRESCAT SCIENTIA; VITA EXCOLATUR) = NATURAL RIGHT OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO BE MASTERS OF THEIR OWN FATE = THE TRAFFIC OF WOMEN: NOTES ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SEX (Gayle Rubin; AO-59 MAGNUM OPUSCULUM) = WIDESPREAD MOVEMENT AFFIRMING A RADICAL AND MYSTICAL PROTESTANTISM (AO-100 ANTINOMIAN BREAKING POINT).

AO 224 = NANTA, GREAT SPIRIT OF EARTH WHO RULES THE ENTIRE ELEMENTAL TABLET OF EARTH = 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 582 = HOW THAT TEMPERAMENT IS IMPRINTED ON THE FACE IS THE QUESTION = IN THE NAME OF GOD LET THERE BE LIGHT UNTO THE VOID A RESTRICTION = IT IS CLEAR THAT THE ARM OF CRITICISM CANNOT REPLACE THE CRITICISM OF ARMS = ONE REACHES THE OTHER SIDE WITHOUT TRAVERSING THE SUGGESTED PATH (AO-111 ERRATIC FLUCTUATIONS OF POTENTIA) = THE CONCOURSE OF THE FOURCES: THE FORTY-EIGHT ANGELICAL KEYS OR CALLS = THE FACE IS CENTRAL TO EMOTION AND HAS PRIORITY OVER VISCERAL CHANGES = THE FILM-MAKER'S ETHIC IN THE FACE OF THE INÉVIDENCE OF THE TIMES = WE HAVE AN X RAY OF THE FORCES ENGAGED AND WHAT THEY SHOULD BE DOING (AO-62 THE FORCES ENGAGED).

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.